#information eg

[hedgehog-moss]

One mistake I made a lot when I started learning English was writing both the auxiliary and the main verb in past tense—as in, "Did the rain stopped?" My English teacher had to really drill this grammar point into my head, she was like "the point of 'did' here is to indicate past tense, there's no need for another time marker." Me, genuinely baffled: "Why not?" Teacher: "Think of the 'ed' in 'stopped' as having migrated to the beginning of the sentence and become 'did'. So it's no longer in 'stopped'." Well I was sad to see it go. I pointed out that in French you'd say "The rain (itself) has it stopped?" and 'the rain' feels welcome to stay even though the whole point of the pronoun 'it' should be to replace it in a quicker way. But it would be sad if the noun & its pronoun never got to hang out together so we keep both <3

My teacher had a British look on her face that made my middle-school self wonder if maybe she thought my language wasn't optimally designed, and then she said that in English it would feel clunky to give the same piece of grammatical information twice, and "if you use 'did' then the -ed in 'stopped' doesn't add anything." That just sounded offensive, I mean since when do letters need to add something to a sentence? isn't it enough that they adorn the end of words & frolic with the others in friendship. If it bothers you so much just don't pronounce them. Idk, "did the rain stopped" felt so right to me. In the end my teacher said that "The rain has it stopped?" with the redundant pronoun is the more formal French phrasing anyway, and I was like yeah true we'd rather say "is it that it (itself) has stopped to rain?" and I felt like this really proved my point and I think she felt the same way

[narfoonthenet]

So, we can agree we need more of kitty-form Tedd, right

[dailyserirei]

me when i found out about ways to make your water-based nail polish stays longer (im strupid

[badolmen]

People love ragging on Catholics on this site (fast free and easy like river water socks) but I think it’s extra funny y’all seem to think Catholics are some sort of sex prudes. Like, if a Catholic man does not give his wife an orgasm he is failing his sworn duties as a husband. I did not endure polite insinuations that my parents fucked often and well to have as many kids as they have for you to act like any self respecting Catholic is a celibate virgin. Laypeople have sex in this denomination Kaitleign. What are we, Calvinists? Jansenism is soooo 17th century Protestant Reformation-informed heresy.

[chamerionwrites]

I realize this is sort of my pet soapbox but imho it is deeply embarrassing for the USAmerican left that most of you have no real institutional critique of conservative USAmerican Christianity beyond like. Recognizing that they are mean to women and queer people, mocking the very low-hanging fruit of their wacky culture war antics, and making vague emotionally-satisfying-but-at-best-kinda-ahistorical claims that everything wrong with USAmerican culture can be traced back to the Puritans.

To be clear. Obviously it is both true and bad that they are mean to women and queer people. But I like to think that if my country’s politics were being driven rightward at an alarming rate by Christofascist reactionaries I would care very much about who they are, how they organize themselves, their history as a political movement, the specifics of their ideology, etc instead of just going teehee War On Christmas, teehee self-righteous preachy evangelicals having threesomes with the poolboy all the time.

[romanceyourdemons]

very funny to me that although scum villain is mostly third person limited, it makes an exception to let the audience know that although shen qingqiu thinks he looks like a fucked up tragic old guy, any normal person who saw him in this moment would think he looks incredibly hot

[briwates]

Was looking into the significance of Isaac, Yohan and Elijah's names in the symbolic of tdj's narrative. I'm wondering if tdj Isaac was named after Abraham's son because Jisang and his wife had him late or had trouble conceiving a child, making Isaac all the more special to his parents.

The irony of Yohan's arrival....a second son that should've been a blessing but turned out to be unwanted by both his parents

[autisticlalna]

my current point of pride is that ruby or viking can go "hey leo can you--" and i will crash through a wall and go ON IT, BOSS

[girderednerve]

i have once more Read a Book !

the book was jim morris' cancer factory: industrial chemicals, corporate deception, & the hidden deaths of american workers. this book! is very good! it is primarily about the bladder cancer outbreak associated with the goodyear plant in niagara falls, new york, & which was caused by a chemical called orthotoluedine. goodyear itself is shielded by new york's workers' comp law from any real liability for these exposures & occupational illnesses; instead, a lot of the information that morris relies on comes from suits against dupont, which manufactured the orthotoluedine that goodyear used, & despite clear internal awareness of its carcinogenicity, did not inform its clients, who then failed to protect their workers. fuck dupont! morris also points out that goodyear manufactured polyvinyl chloride (PVC) at that plant, and, along with other PVC manufacturers, colluded to hide the cancer-causing effects of vinyl chloride, a primary ingredient in PVC & the chemical spilled in east palestine, ohio in 2023. the book also discusses other chemical threats to american workers, including, and this was exciting for me personally, silica; it mentions the hawks nest tunnel disaster (widely forgotten now despite being influential in the 30s, and, by some measures, the deadliest industrial disaster in US history) & spends some time on the outbreak of severe silicosis among southern california countertop fabricators, associated with high-silica 'engineered stone' or 'quartz' countertops. i shrieked about that, the coverage is really good although the treatment of hawks nest was very brief & neglected the racial dynamic at play (the workers exposed to silica at hawks nest were primarily migrant black workers from the deep south).

cancer factory spends a lot of time on the regulatory apparatus in place to respond to chemical threats in the workplace, & thoroughly lays out how inadequate they are. OSHA is responsible for setting exposure standards for workplace chemicals, but they have standards for only a tiny fraction—less than one percent!—of chemicals used in american industry, and issue standards extremely slowly. the two major issues it faces, outside of its pathetically tiny budget, are 1) the standard for demonstrating harm for workers is higher than it is for the general public, a problem substantially worsened during the reagan administration but not created by it, and 2) OSHA is obliged to regulate each individual chemical separately, rather than by functional groups, which, if you know anything at all about organic chemistry, is nonsensical on its face. morris spends a good amount of time on the tenure of eula bingham as the head of OSHA during the carter administration; she was the first woman to head the organization & made a lot of reasonable reforms (a cotton dust standard for textile workers!), but could not get a general chemical standard, allowing OSHA to regulate chemicals in blocks instead of individually, through, & then of course much of her good work was undone by reagan appointees.

the part of the book that made me most uncomfortable was morris' attempt to include birth defects in his analysis. i don't especially love the term 'birth defect'—it feels cruel & seems to me to openly devalue disabled people's lives, no?—but i did appreciate attention to women's experiences in the workplace, and i think workplace chemical exposure is an underdiscussed part of reproductive justice. cancer factory mentions women lead workers who were forced to undergo tubal ligations to retain their employment, supposedly because lead is a teratogen. morris points at workers in silicon valley's electronics industry; workers, most of them women, who made those early transistors were exposed to horrifying amounts of lead, benzene, and dangerous solvents, often with disabling effects for their children.

morris points out again & again that we only know that there was an outbreak of bladder cancer & that it should be associated with o-toluedine because the goodyear plant workers were organized with the oil, chemical, & atomic workers (OCAW; now part of united steelworkers), and the union pursued NIOSH investigation and advocated for improved safety and monitoring for employees, present & former. even so, 78 workers got bladder cancer, 3 died of angiosarcoma, and goodyear workers' families experienced bladder cancer and miscarriage as a result of secondary exposure. i kept thinking about unorganized workers in the deep south, cancer alley in louisiana, miners & refinery workers; we don't have meaningful safety enforcement or monitoring for many of these workers. we simply do not know how many of them have been sickened & killed by their employers. there is no political will among people with power to count & prevent these deaths. labor protections for workers are better under the biden administration than the trump administration, but biden's last proposed budget leaves OSHA with a functional budget cut after inflation, and there is no federal heat safety standard for indoor workers. the best we get is marginal improvement, & workers die. i know you know! but it's too big to hold all the same.

anyway it's a good book, it's wide-ranging & interested in a lot of experiences of work in america, & morris presents an intimate (sometimes painfully so!) portrait of workers who were harmed by goodyear & dupont. would recommend

[vorobej]

i have acquired a lot of self-assuredness in my intellectual capabilities this past year at least

[justashadetalkative]

Details: Phosa & Linast

Mundane video technology hits something not unlike an uncanny valley for Phosa & Linast on two fronts:

1) Their spacial awareness is intense and encompasses the electromagnetic field around them, so trying to process 2D images as representations of 3D objects & space was a learning curve for them. Even after they learned the trick of it, it’s still more like viewing an autostereogram than anything natural or automatic. (They have to trick themselves into perceiving it as looking at something that is very far away and outside of themselves, even as it's (usually) radiating from inside their range of perception.) 2) They don't have a brain that smooths a rapid sequence of images into a perception of smooth motion for them, and while their conscious processing speed isn't precise or rapid enough for them to truly discern the actual movement of light through space (unless working with large enough distances), they can still sense it to some degree. Between those two factors, it's like touching a vibrating surface; they sure as heck couldn't count the individual jerks, but they can feel that something about the motion isn’t smooth.

Some of these factors were mitigated during that human incident, and it went a long way towards helping them figure out how to interpret 2D images the way most sighted humans do.

[leatherbookmark]

my lack of a dw intro post was pissing me off SO much like you have NO idea how much, and then i realized it's all just harmless unserious fun, yknow, just silly little nicknames for when you're nine and don't want Bad People From The Internet to Get You so instead of telling them your name is annie (and you're nine) you choose to call yourself sparkle, or radiator. or, when you're not feeling like any of these, isbn 978-83-240-6528-8. happens to everyone!

anyway, if anyone wanted to have an actual human name extra nickname, a super secret spy alias, &c, &c, to refer to me, they could choose between julian and isa. fun!

[thedreadvampy]

and actually I also know I'm good at accessible factual writing because:

my informational/opinion-led posts keep getting Many Notes

in those notes people largely correctly understand what I'm conveying

and don't debunk my claims even when they would to

and also

in a different context but engaging factual writing about social issues is Literally My Day Job and I am consistently extremely successful at it

[badolmen]

I am closing my ask box temporarily - I have 100+ campaign asks to get through, some of them repeats, and I want to answer the oldest first.

[xanthumn]

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

im doing one for shinon too bc he deserves it

shinon radiant dawn vc: my mom never hugged me

shinon path of radiance and radiant dawn vc: -treats greil like a respectable father and never mentions his own father literally ever-

shinon radiant dawn death quote: (smiling portrait) “Ugh... This is...such a crock... What a... boring way to die... Co... Commander... Greil... I... I... I'm...” (is he implying “I’m coming to see you again”, based on the quote and smiling portrait?)